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Whether it be a car breaking down or somebody actually dead - they once said (several years back) that they had all sworn to keep going !!

However - Jeremy was kind of the leader. Hammond maybe could do it - would be strange. If it were me - I'd bail because I'd just "cock it up." Wouldn't want to be around as it fell down. Get out while on the top.

I saw an interview yesterday with Capt Slow on his front porch. He acknowledged the media reports and then said "If you'll excuse me I have a LaFerrari to list on eBay" and left.

Yes thank you. This is a classic mistake that many first time programmers make. Years ago somebody was comparing the speed of C++ over VBScript/IIS over Java for writing Web pages back to a browser. They too came to a similar conclusion - and also made the same mistake.

When writing to disk - the data is written once. The algorithm for in memory is not doing the same thing. It is allocating a new buffer - copying all data to said new buffer - and finally adding data to the end. If one compared the I/O of the two program executions the "in-memory" version would have many times MORE I/O.

In C# and I think Java - there is an object called StringBuffer - and is intended for this kind of workload. The first thing I learned in data structures class was how to expand buffers using different algorithms and pro/con of each (heap design for instance, buddy system).

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "If Jupiter and Saturn hadn’t formed where they did—and at the sizes they did—as the disk of dust and gas around our sun coalesced, then our solar system would be a very different and possibly more hostile place, new research suggests. Computer models reveal that in the solar system’s first 3 million years or so, gravitational interactions with Jupiter, Saturn, and the gas in the protoplanetary disk would have driven super-Earth–sized planets closer to the sun and into increasingly elliptical orbits. In such paths, a cascade of collisions would have blasted any orbs present there into ever smaller bits, which in turn would have been slowed by the interplanetary equivalent of atmospheric drag and eventually plunged into the sun. As Jupiter retreated from its closest approach to the sun, it left behind the mostly rocky remnants that later coalesced into our solar system’s inner planets, including Earth."Link to Original Source

MarcAuslander (517215) writes "Eneco, a Dutch-based energy company with more than 2 million customers, said Tuesday it is installing "e-Radiators" — computer servers that generate heat while crunching numbers — in five homes across the Netherlands in a trial to see if their warmth could be a commercially viable alternative for traditional radiators."Link to Original Source

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Suppose you dug a tunnel through the center of Earth, jumped in, and let gravity pull you through. How long would it take you to reach the other side of the planet? For decades, physics students have been asked to calculate that time and have been taught that the correct answer is 42 minutes. Now, a more realistic analysis has lopped 4 minutes off that estimate."Link to Original Source

There are whole TV shows written around this very idea. One can simply observe mannerisms and jump to fully detailed truths about people. These writers must have something to base these plots lines on - they couldn't publish a TV show if it weren't true...right?!

So why shouldn't a TSA executive use the idea, sort out the details, get the best scientists/consultants to provide the truthiness, and create the real thing. I mean - isn't this what the Lone Gunmen proposed in X-Files? Secret science that was all true but hidden from us normal folks via conspiracy theories?!

Junk Science is labeled by people who refuse to think outside the box. Go talk to the Creationists - they know what's going on.

Or - the aliens are so smart that they have placed into the very universe this cool repeating pattern trying to communicate with us. As in "Yo! dude... blink blink blink - here we are!" Everywhere we look - this thing keeps appearing... nature, math, planets. Maybe there is a commonality.

Wow - imagine some super alien that could have intelligently designed such a feature into the universe. [big smirk]

Rebuild it without the bullshit? I can't see how rebuilding it would get us to a different location - we are here because this is what we wanted to build. Having a life full of regret where you wouldn't live it the same way again is looking back and wishing for a better existence.

Will it morph to go somewhere else because that's what we want? The article argues that there are at least two forces: the walled gardens that offer us candy - and our desire to consume whatever looks new & hot.

And big data will fill the gaps. Plus - we will want this data. It references a BBC claim that by 2019 a large % of us will WANT to use apps that record & archives our spoken conversations. It isn't that some secretive group will build these time lines - WE will do it. WE will want to do it.

It sounds rather dystopian. I've read old (1970's) sci fi novels on similar subjects. Those who have managed to stay out of the system and those who are in it. Even The Matrix wants to extract people from the system - and there's a whole underground world living outside of it.

While MS has always had XBox separate from Windows OS - haven't they always had a toolkit/library/framework strategy that promised an almost-write-once game experience across platofrms? And it was weak?

I've heard interviews with developers who used XNA to built mobile games that also run on XBox - with a few, uh, gaps - or caveats.

What is missing is that single game store. A few years ago MS promised this flying game that looked amazing (Simulator replacement?). I signed up for the beta but wasn't accepted - and later received a notice that it was generally available. It was called an XBox game !! So I searched for it and couldn't find it on the Xbox store. After a week of half-assed Google searching I discovered that it was a Windows game (and possibly used the Kinect inputs for those who had the USB version). Talk about confusing. It wasn't available on the XBox.

Personally I'd like to buy a game via my PC or mobile device and have it delivered to my XBox. Kind of like the method for buying music.

HughPickens.com (3830033) writes "The Guardian reports that millions of people may have been left vulnerable to hackers while surfing the web on Apple and Google devices, thanks to a newly discovered security flaw known as “FREAK attack.” Researchers blame the problem on an old government policy, abandoned over a decade ago, which required US software makers to use weaker security in encryption programs sold overseas due to national security concerns. Many popular websites and some internet browsers continued to accept the weaker software, or can be tricked into using it, according to experts at several research institutions who reported their findings. According to Ars Technica a scan of more than 14 million websites that support the secure sockets layer or transport layer security protocols found that more than 36 percent of them were vulnerable to the decryption attacks: "The so-called FREAK attack—short for Factoring attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys—is possible when an end user with a vulnerable device—currently known to include Android smartphones, iPhones, and Macs running Apple's OS X operating system—connects to a vulnerable HTTPS-protected website. Vulnerable sites are those configured to use a weak cipher that many had presumed had been retired long ago. At the time this post was being prepared, most Windows and Linux end-user devices were not believed to be affected."

The flaw resulted from a former U.S. government policy that forbade the export of strong encryption and required that weaker “export-grade” products be shipped to customers in other countries, say the researchers who discovered the problem. These restrictions were lifted in the late 1990s, but the weaker encryption got baked into widely used software that proliferated around the world and back into the United States, apparently unnoticed until this year."

mpicpp (3454017) writes "The ESA released an image Tuesday of the comet-orbiting Rosetta leaving a fleeting mark on the comet: its shadow. The space agency describes it as being "encircled in a wreath of light." It was a rare confluence of circumstances that enabled the image to exist as the sun, spacecraft and comet all came into alignment.

The shadow is diffuse, rather than sharp. The ESA explains this by noting, "If you were standing on the surface with Rosetta high above you, there would be no place in the shadow where the entire Sun would be blocked from view, which explains why there is no fully dark core to the shadow."

The image was taken during a close flyby of the comet on February 14, but the ESA just now brought it to the public's attention. Rosetta — which was launched back in 2004 and sent on a mission to approach and study Comet 67P — was at a distance of about 3.7 miles from the comet's surface at the time.

What's so intriguing about the shadow image is that it's something familiar happening in an alien place, 317 million miles away. We're all used to seeing our shadows here on Earth. Rosetta casting a shadow on a comet puts its epic space adventure into a more human perspective."Link to Original Source